Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (12 page)

Politically, Reagan was evolving. While Nancy’s own loyalties were influenced by her stepfather Loyal Davis’s staunch Republicanism, his new son-in-law—
who’d voted for FDR, supported the New Deal, campaigned for Harry Truman, and, more than that,
had backed Helen Gahagan Douglas in her California Senate race against Richard Nixon—
would remain a registered Democrat for another decade.

In 1937 Reagan had joined the Screen Actors Guild shortly after arriving in Hollywood. He’d gone onto its board as an alternate in 1941. Then, after the war, he resumed his involvement (serving at one point as an alternate for Boris Karloff).
In 1946 he became vice president, and the next year, the guild’s president. SAG was then involved in a bitter dispute with a craft union coalition, the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), whose hard-left leadership wanted its support.
Ugly violence had broken out at the Warner Bros. gates
between strikers and those wanting to cross the CSU picket lines.
In the weeks that followed, Reagan became a persuasive SAG voice against continuing to honor those picket lines, and many fellow union members began falling in step behind him. Threatened by anonymous phone calls, he began carrying a .32 pistol. His rousing speech to the SAG membership now produced a stunning return-to-work vote: 2,748 to 509. The studio bosses also applauded his position.
“Ronnie Reagan has turned out to be a tower of strength,” declared Jack Warner, “not only for the actors but for the whole industry.”

Reagan would go on to serve as SAG president for a total of seven terms. Despite his long-held ambition to act and to be thought well of as an actor, he was proving a natural at this real-life role he liked to call the
“citizen-politician.” Those who want to dismiss Ronald Reagan merely as a good-looking guy inspired to enter politics as his screen career started fading should take a moment to consider the heartfelt eloquence of testimony he gave in the fall of 1947, seven months after being elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.
His audience: the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The issue: communist influence in the movie industry.

Like many other Hollywood liberals of his era, Reagan walked a middle line between the arch anticommunists and those more tolerantly inclined.
While acknowledging that the Communist Party undoubtedly wished to exploit Hollywood as a propaganda tool in any way it could, he vehemently objected to the idea that they were getting away with it.
When asked by Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator, “What steps should be taken to rid the motion picture industry of any communist influences?” here was Reagan’s reply:

• • •

Well, sir, ninety-nine percent of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think, within the bounds of our democratic rights and never once stepping over the rights given us by democracy, we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed. After all, we must recognize them at present as a political party. On that basis we have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority.

In opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake. Whether or not the Party should be outlawed, that is a matter for the government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent a hundred and seventy years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party—and I think the government is capable of proving that—then that is another matter. I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work. I happen to be very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight. I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.

It’s a statement that, delivered with respectful courtesy and a genial forthrightness, neatly claims its own ground. Ronald Reagan was taking a stand proclaiming full faith in democracy—and, along with it, his belief in the American people’s good judgment. It comes off without even a lurking shadow of partisanship or of politics as we normally think of them. Here was a man who’d been student body president in high school, who went on to deliver what he considered his maiden crowd-stirring political speech when just a college freshman. Sitting up there on Capitol Hill in 1947, responding to the House committee’s questions, he was no amateur. Acting had been the detour, as would become increasingly clear.

By 1954, that detour was offering precarious turns in the road. His agent, Lew Wasserman, had gotten him a
two-week stand as emcee of a Las Vegas revue act. It had him cracking Irish jokes and playing straight man to the other performers.
“It’s a long way down for Reagan from his box-office glory of 11 years ago,” ran a cruel item in the trade press.

Now came Wasserman to the rescue.
Within weeks Reagan began his eight-year tenure presenting
General Electric Theater;
he was the half-hour anthology broadcast’s
first and only continuing host. It would prove a huge career opportunity for him.
Airing on Sundays at 9 p.m., EST, the GE-sponsored program featured a wide range of stars:
James Dean, Jack Benny,
Natalie Wood,
Lee Marvin,
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Over the eight years it ran, the weekly guests represented a virtual
Who’s Who
of mid-twentieth-century show business.
GE Theater
was the way Americans growing up in the 1950s—
Bill Clinton and me, to name just two—got to know and like Ronald Reagan.

And not only did he welcome us to
GE
every Sunday; Reagan also went to the road on its behalf.
Traveling to hundreds of cities
and towns by train, he became the company’s representative both to the outside world and to itself. A typical day might include a local press conference, a Chamber of Commerce lunch, and a civic association evening banquet, with a high school or college campus appearance in between, as well as sessions with General Electric employees in their offices and on their factory floors.
“I am seen by more people in one week than I am in a full year in movie theaters,” is how Reagan chose to frame his remarkable new visibility.
As of 1958 he was one of the most recognized figures in the country—not as an actor in a role but as Ronald Reagan himself.

Despite having been the public face of General Electric to millions of Americans—personally greeting and meeting, it’s estimated,
at least a quarter of a million of them as he continuously toured—
the relationship ended abruptly in 1962. What they had once seen as positive about Reagan’s rhetoric—his call to arms against big government at home and communism abroad—may have been viewed by corporate execs as impolitic. The larger factor was ratings.
GE Theater,
at one time the third highest rated show on all of television, was now fighting a long battle with
Bonanza
for its time slot.

In 1964 Ronald Reagan emerged fully into the open as a leader of the new conservative wing of the Republican Party.
What brought him this increased prominence was a stirring stump speech he was tirelessly giving out on the Republican circuit in support of Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizonan who was then the GOP presidential candidate. Called “A Time for Choosing,”
the Goldwater campaign paid to have it nationally televised the week before Election Day.

Social Security, he said, “is not insurance but is a welfare program and Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government.” Proclaiming that the country had
“a rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan preached his beliefs with a fervor that had slowly but steadily been building deep inside him. “We’ll preserve for our
children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
It was a speech he’d been polishing for years, and he meant it all, every single word and thought.

When Reagan ran for governor of California two years later and won a monumental victory, beating incumbent governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown by a million votes, he had turned himself into a singular political force to be reckoned with. Yet Democrats across the country, especially in Washington, would continue to question his legitimacy as a rising star—one with a bigger future than he’d ever had as a Warner contract player. They saw him more as a strictly California phenomenon, a West Coast punch line who’d never play beyond Sacramento.

Ignoring the million votes, they preferred to believe Ronald Reagan to be simply a good-looking, good-natured fellow who’d gotten his career from a screen test. Yet the signs indicating a different scenario had been there early on, as they are for most politicians—for anyone looking to see. Those who end up running for office can rarely hide the ambition in their youth.

His critics were ignoring a more basic fact.
To denigrate Reagan’s profession—dismissing him as a fellow who’d played against a chimp or shilled for lightbulbs—was to miss a very big and obvious truth: people
like
actors and are fascinated by them. Pat Brown, a man whom voters had failed ever to be fascinated by, actually appeared in
a televised campaign ad in which he’s seen warning a group of schoolchildren against the dangerous world represented by his opponent, the movie star. “I’m running against an actor . . . and you know who shot Lincoln, don’tcha?” It’s even more peculiar an attack if you consider the number of California voters connected to the movie business.

In reality, the political Ronald Reagan was playing a role he’d
created himself: the outsider as representative of all the decent, honest people fed up with standard-issue politicians.
“As a politician, he would always have you believe that he was a reluctant candidate—he became a governor, then president, only because people insisted they needed him,” his son Ron Reagan observed.

When accused of being poorly equipped by professional background to run the huge state of California, Reagan had blown off his detractors with one of those pronouncements he specialized in.
“The man who
has
the job,” he countered, “has more experience than anybody. That’s why I’m running.”

The way Reagan came to perfect the role of citizen-politician can be seen at the climax of the speech he gave accepting the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. Just as he was about to leave the convention podium
that July night in 1980, he appeared to go through a slight moment of indecision. “I have thought of something,” he said, briefly pausing, “that is not part of my speech and I’m worried over whether I should do it.” It was a brilliant moment of stagecraft. His listeners waited, curious. Now they were actively in the scene along with him, the audience that could not see the script on the card in front of him.

“Can we doubt,” he then asked, his voice ringing with purpose, “that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.

“I’ll confess,” he went on, “that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest—I’m more afraid not to—that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.”

It was a moment, too, of transformation for Reagan. No longer the actor and foregoing the role of politician, he was now one of the people daring to speak against “them,” those who would challenge the right to pray at such a moment.

Ronald Reagan, not yet elected president, had gotten to precisely where he wanted to be in life.

His concluding words: “God bless America.”

“All politics is local.”

—T
HOMAS
P. O’N
EILL
, S
R
.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, Tip O’Neill never faced poverty.
When he was tapped for the annual “Horatio Alger Award,” the Speaker turned down the honor. “I’m not eligible,” the proud Irish-American told me to tell the association presenting it. “I wasn’t born poor.”

His father, Thomas Philip O’Neill, Sr., was the superintendent of sewers in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, responsible for 150 miles of municipal sewer lines. Powerful enough to be nicknamed “the Governor” in the neighborhoods, he commanded an army of employees, which meant a ready supply of patronage always at his disposal. If you did your chores for the local Democratic Party, that entitled you to a “snow button.” If you showed up wearing it the next time snow fell, you could be assured of a paying job
clearing the streets. If you didn’t have the button, you were out in the cold.